Vote for Haas Team Fighting HIV in South Africa

April 10, 2012

A team of Berkeley MBA students who traveled to South Africa last year as part of the Haas School's International Business Development (IBD) course is competing against 11 schools to win the MBA Challenge Video Contest.

The 4:33-minute video was created by Archit Bhargava, Stuart Kamin, Philip Dawsey, and Pablo Alvarez, all MBA 12. It documents the students' efforts developing a plan and framework for loveLife─a South African NGO formed to promote healthy, HIV-free living among teenagers─to expand into the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.

The competition invited students to show through video how they are making an impact in the developing world through their student projects, startup enterprises, and new careers, and how their MBA experience contributed to that impact.

The top five videos chosen by online voting will advance to the next round of judging by a committee selected by the Global Business School Network, the competition sponsor. The first-place winner will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Delhi, India, for the seventh annual Conference of the Global Business School Network in June. The network is a nonprofit focused on addressing the shortage of skilled managers in the developing world.

Other schools in the video competition include Tuck and the University of Michigan in the U.S. and the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and IPADE Business School in Mexico outside the U.S.

An IBD team from Haas led by Hrishika Vuppala, MBA 11, won the competition last year with a video about their project in Zambia working with the Wildlife Conservation Society and Community Markets for Conservation. COMACO asks poachers to turn in their equipment to save wildlife and then provides them farm and work training, including the production of peanut butter and other products. Berkeley-Haas students helped COMACO develop a plan for sustainable growth.